I wouldn't call it worthless. It's not for everyone. I have one and have found limited use. For navigation it's actually easier and faster if a controller is nearby. If not, it is convenient to be able to then speak your way through. Of course talking out loud for general navigation probably isn't going to be, and hasn't become a big thing to do. If you "have" to connect it, hopefully it has been streamlined. With no motor, it should be much smaller. Also requiring less physical space will help increase its use.

As for the Xbox 3 reportedly being underpowered compared to the PS4. That is the interpretation of PS fans. Most centered around GDDR5 vs. DDR3. While all things being equal GDDR5 is faster, and more expensive, there are many things that can be done to erase or eliminate the modest real world performance gain. And talking 8GB, it could result in a significant console price difference. Cost means a LOT these days.

Going solely by the leaked specs, the compute power of the Xbox 3 is 1.23 TFlops, the PS4's is 1.85 TFlops. It's not really interpretation, it's based on the numbers we have so far. That's pretty much the difference between a model range in PC GPU's. AMD 7770 vs. AMD 7850. or Nvidia GTX 650 vs. GTX 660.

Going solely by the leaked specs, the compute power of the Xbox 3 is 1.23 TFlops, the PS4's is 1.85 TFlops. It's not really interpretation, it's based on the numbers we have so far. That's pretty much the difference between a model range in PC GPU's. AMD 7770 vs. AMD 7850. or Nvidia GTX 650 vs. GTX 660.

And as we found with the PS3, specs alone don't tell you the whole picture.

This is most likely only for the XDK Kits. Microsoft had bad issues with 360 XDKs getting out in the wild and resorted to bricking unauthorized XDKS (by using the MAC address of a console that had been marked off, stolen, lost, broken..) Now, you have to submit your IP to microsoft to have it whitelisted.

With that said, the real reason microsoft requires this on retail consoles is,

Going solely by the leaked specs, the compute power of the Xbox 3 is 1.23 TFlops, the PS4's is 1.85 TFlops. It's not really interpretation, it's based on the numbers we have so far. That's pretty much the difference between a model range in PC GPU's. AMD 7770 vs. AMD 7850. or Nvidia GTX 650 vs. GTX 660.

Actually it is open to interpretation. It depends on bus configuration and throughput throughout the system, system and graphics caching, shared cache, memory, memory allocation, etc. etc.

Edit: No one even knows the performance impact of the four Move engines.

"Durango hardware has four move engines for fast direct memory access (DMA)This accelerators are truly fixed-function, in the sense that their algorithms are embedded in hardware. They can usually be considered black boxes with no intermediate results that are visible to software. When used for their designed purpose, however, they can offload work from the rest of the system and obtain useful results at minimal cost.

The four move engines all have a common baseline ability to move memory in any combination of the following ways:

From main RAM or from ESRAM

To main RAM or to ESRAM

From linear or tiled memory format

To linear or tiled memory format

From a sub-rectangle of a texture

To a sub-rectangle of a texture

From a sub-box of a 3D texture

To a sub-box of a 3D texture

The move engines can also be used to set an area of memory to a constant value."

Going solely by the leaked specs, the compute power of the Xbox 3 is 1.23 TFlops, the PS4's is 1.85 TFlops. It's not really interpretation, it's based on the numbers we have so far. That's pretty much the difference between a model range in PC GPU's. AMD 7770 vs. AMD 7850. or Nvidia GTX 650 vs. GTX 660.

Pure data crunching performance means absolutely NOTHING in real world performance of course. even if these use mostly the same architecture there are key differences, for example the two move engines in the nextbox could have a huge impact on certain graphics performance as well as other performance and eliminate that whole gap and give advantages in certain situations to the xbox.

so you can't just look by the numbers of fantasyflops one APU pushes vs another. that's just one piece of a very big puzzle.

Actually it is open to interpretation. It depends on bus configuration and throughput throughout the system, system and graphics caching, shared cache, memory, memory allocation, etc. etc.

Edit: No one even knows the performance impact of the four Move engines.

"Durango hardware has four move engines for fast direct memory access (DMA)This accelerators are truly fixed-function, in the sense that their algorithms are embedded in hardware. They can usually be considered black boxes with no intermediate results that are visible to software. When used for their designed purpose, however, they can offload work from the rest of the system and obtain useful results at minimal cost.

The four move engines all have a common baseline ability to move memory in any combination of the following ways:

From main RAM or from ESRAM

To main RAM or to ESRAM

From linear or tiled memory format

To linear or tiled memory format

From a sub-rectangle of a texture

To a sub-rectangle of a texture

From a sub-box of a 3D texture

To a sub-box of a 3D texture

The move engines can also be used to set an area of memory to a constant value."

basically they free up a LOT of work that the PS4 has to do with shaders, stuff the shaders aren't actually optimized for since.. they're.. shaders...

The Move Engines are for Kinect, hardware compression/decompression, they are mainly used to maximise the throughput limited RAM and to ease CPU burden not to supplement GPU power. They are basically just the SPUs like on the CELL CPU.

All the shaders on the PS4 are beefed up anyway, it was originally only going to be 4 of the 18 CUs but all 18 will have extra ALU.

And as we found with the PS3, specs alone don't tell you the whole picture.

I agree, but in this case both platforms are using the same GPUs, so this time around the specs are easier to compare.

Actually it is open to interpretation. It depends on bus configuration and throughput throughout the system, system and graphics caching, shared cache, memory, memory allocation, etc. etc.

Edit: No one even knows the performance impact of the four Move engines.

"Durango hardware has four move engines for fast direct memory access (DMA)This accelerators are truly fixed-function, in the sense that their algorithms are embedded in hardware. They can usually be considered black boxes with no intermediate results that are visible to software. When used for their designed purpose, however, they can offload work from the rest of the system and obtain useful results at minimal cost.

The four move engines all have a common baseline ability to move memory in any combination of the following ways:

From main RAM or from ESRAM

To main RAM or to ESRAM

From linear or tiled memory format

To linear or tiled memory format

From a sub-rectangle of a texture

To a sub-rectangle of a texture

From a sub-box of a 3D texture

To a sub-box of a 3D texture

The move engines can also be used to set an area of memory to a constant value."

All of the functions the move engines handle are normally handled by the CPU, if anything they would take load off the CPU, not the GPU. Most games nowadays are bottlenecked by GPU performance, not CPU performance.

Yes, overall performance is based on the throughput of the system, but using a PC as an example, you're not going to get the performance of a GTX 660 on a GTX 650 by upgrading your motherboard. Yes, you can squeeze some additional performance with a better motherboard, but you're going to be limited by the GPU.

Again, this is just based on the leaked specs, so for all we know the XBOX could indeed be faster.

And as we found with the PS3, specs alone don't tell you the whole picture.

When they're both of the same architecture, which these gpus are said to be, the specs actually do tell the whole picture. As unlike the previous consoles, those can be directly compared with one another.

Pure data crunching performance means absolutely NOTHING in real world performance of course. even if these use mostly the same architecture there are key differences, for example the two move engines in the nextbox could have a huge impact on certain graphics performance as well as other performance and eliminate that whole gap and give advantages in certain situations to the xbox.

so you can't just look by the numbers of fantasyflops one APU pushes vs another. that's just one piece of a very big puzzle.

Sure it doesn't. And by that logic a radeon 6670 would be just as fast as my 6870.

Also, the move engines would have to be alot more than they actually are to be able to make up for the sizeable difference between the reported specs.

Yes, overall performance is based on the throughput of the system, but using a PC as an example, you're not going to get the performance of a GTX 660 on a GTX 650 by upgrading your motherboard.

I did want to comment on this. PCs play games well through sheer horsepower. They should perform even better than they do as compared to consoles. Much of that horsepower is eaten by sheer resolution. PCs internal busses are not optimized for the singular task of play games. You can compare the end result, but not how they get there.

You probably could get from a 650 to 660 performance if the motherboard, chipset, and memory were optimized for facilitating maximum effective fill rate, moving and manipulating textures, etc. etc. All things being equal, the more powerful GPU should result in a more powerful system overall. However, things are not equal.

They are requiring hdd installs so that later on when they offer downloadable games nothing has to be changed. I really hope the next xbox has hdmi in. I would get it to replace my aging google tv Blu-ray player (1st gen).

When they're both of the same architecture, which these gpus are said to be, the specs actually do tell the whole picture. As unlike the previous consoles, those can be directly compared with one another.

The quality of games is also dependent upon the development tools and support offered by the manufacturer, somewhere Sony has traditionally been weaker. And while Sony has confirmed the specs for the PS4, Microsoft has not done so and could respond with some changes. I wouldn't read too much into them at this point.

That said, if both consoles are targeted at the same price point it's logical to assume that the inclusion of the Kinect with all X720 SKUs will result in a lower spec for the base console - that will be compounded if the mandatory installs requirement dictates a greater amount of storage. I mean, a 1TB drive will only be able to store 20 games at 50GB (the capacity of the Blu-ray discs) - even if you assume games will take less than half that, anything less than 1TB will require major juggling of installs and could end up annoying a lot of users.

The SPUs were clearly intended to boost graphic performance/capability. I'm not sure anyone ever mastered them well enough to produced the theoretical performance benefits though. This was apparently one of the more difficult parts of the PS3 to code for and master. Killzone 3 took advantage of them I this way:

"The SPU's were utilized using the Havok engine for physics processing rather than the PS3's dedicated physics processor. Similarly, several graphical processes, like anti-aliasing, were shifted to the SPUs in order to free up the graphics processor for other tasks. Such a move allows the AI scaling to be much more robust."

That was my point, the Move Engines are nothing more than SPUs were on PS3, people are talking like they are some super special silicon that is going to boost GPU performance, at best they will offer "free" antialiasing. They are mainly there to get around the slow bandwidth of the DDR3 RAM.

The PS4 has beefed up ALUs on all the CUs of the GPU, so physics is moot.